• Non-verbal IQ has risen more rapidly than has verbal IQ.
• Performance gains are smallest on the most culturally specific tests, and largest on the most abstract tests.
• Performance gains, as they occur over time, are roughly constant for all age groups.
• Problem-solving abilities have seen the biggest performance gains.

IQ is rising across all age groupsw
hy we are now much more intelligent than our grandparents, by the discoverer of the flynn effect.

dementia rates among people 65 and older in England and Wales have plummeted by 25% over the past 20 years, to 6.2% from 8.3%, a trend that is probably occurring across developed countries and that could have major social and economic implications for families and societies.

if there is a flynn effect for dementia, this means life expectancy isn’t just going up, but what i would call useful life expectancy, ie when you are healthy enough to actually enjoy life, is also going up.

People over age 50 are scoring better on cognitive tests than people of the same age did in the past — a trend that could be linked to higher education rates and increased use of technology in our daily lives, according to a new study published in an open-access paper in the journal PLOS ONE. But the study also showed that average physical health of the older population has declined.

there may be a flynn effect for dogs:

“The big lesson is to recognize that dogs are smarter than we think, and given time, patience and enough enjoyable reinforcement, we can teach them just about anything.”

It’s true that dogs everywhere are doing things that would have been unimaginable in the Alpo era. Researchers trained shepherds and retrievers to sniff out lab samples containing ovarian cancer. Scent hounds are also being used to forecast epileptic seizures and potentially life-threatening infections. A black Labrador was accurate 98% of the time in picking up early-stage signs of colon cancer